I came out of the gate fast, stealing the blinds by raising A6o UTG on the very first hand (we were 7-handed). My next move was 3-bet-calling AJs against an UTG raiser who had a little over 20 BBs. That wouldn’t always be a wise play but I knew this guy to be a very aggressive opener. Speaking of unwise moves, he showed 44 and won the flip.

Of course this is no good if he won’t fold A9, but based on the info that I had at the time, I don’t regret making the play. It’s possible that he puts me on a straight or air here, which is very incorrect. This would be an easy value bet for me with any two pair or better, though sets and straights are also very much in range.Obviously it’s not a very large bet, but my hope was that so deep in the tournament it would still feel very threatening to him. Probably would have worked better if he’d had a shorter and more vulnerable stack.

I stole the blinds a few more times, won a modest pot picking off a river bluff, and then raised KQo and called a 14BB shove to outflip 44. The guy was none too happy with my call, but with the image that I had, I expected people to shove light on me. I’m pretty confident KJ and KT are in his range, not to mention hands like pairs and AJ/AT against which I’m practically flipping and occasional “pretty” hands like T9s.

Small ball was going well for me, and I was getting a lot of chips just by min-raising pre and either taking pots pre-flop or going to showdown cheaply with a marginal hand.

The next big confrontation was against an extremely good player on my right. I don’t believe I’d ever played with him prior to Day 1 of this tournament, and probably a lot of his play is on Euro sites, but he had some high stakes cash experience on Stars, including 4-tabling 25/50 NLHE against Isildur. I wasn’t thrilled to get into a confrontation with him, but my cards were simply too good to play any other way:

It’s not easy to be dealt a hand better than A9. This wasn’t an “open fold my SB” sorta guy, so his opening range is quite wide. Still, given how much I’d been playing back at him, it might have been a little tighter than usual. More importantly, at this stage of the tournament, he’s probably not going to 4-bet in a spot like this (which is quite different from the AJ spot) into an aggressive chipleader all that often. I can easily jam, I can easily take a flop in position, and he just shouldn’t invite that kind of confrontation right now. He’s getting good odds himself, and he surely has a lot of confidence in his postflop play, so a lot of hands that he could consider 4-betting he’ll more likely just call.

It’s hard to say what I should do differently – maybe fold to the 4-bet despite the good odds. Just calling the original raise is OK, but A9 isn’t a hand that plays all that well postflop against a good player with a wide range. It’s just too risky to get so many chips into the pot pre-flop with A9 even in a blind battle. If he has something like 550K chips, I’d feel better writing this off as a cooler.

This wasn’t the end of the tournament for me by any means. I believe I shook it off and plugged away quite valiantly, continuing to fight for pots and pick up chips with controlled aggression. I made some big hands that I was hoping would win a little more than they did given my image, but I was doing well for myself.

This was a tough laydown that I’m still not sure was correct. My timebank was quite low and I didn’t want to burn the last of it, especially since I’ve recently used that extra time to talk myself into some bad calls.

I lost a smallish pot to the AJ guy when I flopped middle pair and he turned a flush. I probably wasn’t putting more money in anyway, but it was nice of him to check it to me twice. The next hand I won a better pot from him anyway:

Where you had Ac, 9d, why raise? A9 should beat his range, so just play in position. Or once you raise, why not just call the 4 bet (I could also see folding, I think 5 bet shoving is the worst? At that point, his range is probably very narrow, and actually, mostly consists of big aces (which dominate you) and big pairs (which are 60-40 over you, except AA which is terrible). I would call his raise, but if I 3 bet, I would call the 4 bet. I think of playing BB heads up like playing the button with a single raise in front of me. I am happy to call and play in position.